Suggestions on Cheap Build to Auto-Backup My Main FreeNAS Rig

[Midshipman]

Greetings!
I built a FreeNAS rig some years back and have been generally quite happy with it. I'd now like to set up a backup rig for my FreeNAS system.

What I have already:

1. Two spare external 3TB hard drives and two spare external 4TB hard drives.
2. A spare external USB 3.0 multiple hard drive enclosure; probably will shuck the externals and put them into this enclosure.

Minimum desires:

1. Automatically, one-way, incrementally backup my FreeNAS System to the Backup System whenever the Backup System is powered on. Backups should start at a specified time, e.g. 2am.
2. Preferably use one of the "plugins" within FreeNAS.
   
3. Encrypted backup volume of multiple disks (the four mentioned above).
   
4. (Eventually) work through the internet as I intend to place this system at a friends house. Should be remotely accessible via the internet for management by someone not super network-savvy.
   
5. Some sort of checksum to verify that the data on the Backup is "good" versus the FreeNAS system.
6. Not take an inordinate amount of custom learning stuff that I'll soon forget and get in a bind two years in the future when I actually have to recover my data. :) I'm a Windows user that barely fuddled his way through getting FreeNAS setup, so something semi-automatic without too much command-line type work would be great.

It'd be great if I could make this super cheap and run on a Raspberry Pi or something similar. It does not need to be high-performance. I know FreeNAS has the ability to send snapshots to another FreeNAS system . . . but I'm not sure if a Raspberry Pi running external USB hard drives will successfully run FreeNAS?

 

[Midshipman]

Well, some more searching found this: https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote-mirror/
Doesn't meet bullet point 6, but it seems like it might get the job done. I'll play around with the "Raspberry Pi Image" sometime and see if I can make it work.

 

[ikke]

My friends just built super streamlined glusterfs gluster using odroids. It could be cheap target for backups, and easy to expand. Well, easy is relative, but if you are inti tinkering ... Have a look at odroids that transform disks to storage bricks:

https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G150229074080

 

[Midshipman]

Hmm, neat, I hadn't heard of odroid before. Seems like a more powerful alternative to Raspberry Pi's? Also they appear to have SATA ports.

I wonder if I could have that single SATA port connect to four separate hard drives?

 

[danb35]

The easy answer, that meets 1-3 and 5-6 (with 4 definitely possible but a little more complicated) but definitely won't run on a Raspberry Pi, is to simply build another FreeNAS box and use replication. No plugins required there.

 

[Midshipman]

Yeah danb35, definitely not a cheap option though. I wonder what the absolute cheapest 4-bay FreeNAS system one can build is if one isn't worried about performance? I'd bet there's some guide on these forums. I'll have to do some searching.

 

[danb35]

I wonder what the absolute cheapest 4-bay FreeNAS system one can build is

About a year ago, I would have said the HPE Proliant ML10 for US$170 brand new (with an i3 even). Not as good a deal now, unfortunately, but deals on small servers do come up around the holidays even so.

 

[joeschmuck]

I think you should consider cost over the lifetime of a system and maintenance problems and time spent to come up with a fair cost.

Now think about some online storage solutions. They can be cheaper in the long run but should be looked into. Once you have the bulk of the data transferred then incremental is easy. This may not be what you are looking for of course but you may want to consider it.

but I'm not sure if a Raspberry Pi running external USB hard drives will successfully run FreeNAS?

Well no, the RIP will not run FreeNAS but do a search on "rpi freenas" and "rpi nas" and you should come up with some good results.

 

[Midshipman]

joeschmuck, yeah I intend to at least look into online options; once incremental not so bad. My internet is like 10mbps up and capped at 1TB/month. (and I have like 10+TB) so difficult, but I have a LOT of spare hard drives. I do appreciate the suggestion to check though!

I am definitely doing some more searching and have found a lot of partial-answers that might work with an Raspberry Pi, though getting something to hit all of my bullet points will be a large challenge.

It'd be great if the FreeNAS team released a simple idiot-proof Windows client that could accept Replication data from a FreeNAS system for exactly my useage case. A Windows 8/10 Storage Pool and a simple clients would do me wonders. (or maybe a Raspberry Pi image that does the same.) Perhaps I'm sounding a little too wanting-my-hand-held, but then again, I think FreeNAS is pretty awesome and should be made as noob-friendly as possible. :)

 

[joeschmuck]

It'd be great if the FreeNAS team released a simple idiot-proof Windows client that could accept Replication data from a FreeNAS system for exactly my useage case. A Windows 8/10 Storage Pool and a simple clients would do me wonders. (or maybe a Raspberry Pi image that does the same.) Perhaps I'm sounding a little too wanting-my-hand-held, but then again, I think FreeNAS is pretty awesome and should be made as noob-friendly as possible. :)

While I wouldn't hold my breath on the FreeNAS team doing anything like this, I'm not sure why you couldn't use RSync. This has been around for a long time and supported but I haven't used it except to try it one time a long time ago so I can't say if it would meet your requirements. The RPI supports RSync as well.

Since you are looking for low cost, I think that taking on building a new design such as an RPI may cost you more money than just setting up another FreeNAS server. With FreeNAS you do not have to run multiple disks, you can just use single drives for a vdev or make one large pool out of a few drives with no fault protection. Just grab any old computer that has at least 8GB RAM and build a bare bones version, and I stress bare bones. You know what, you might be able to get away using an early version of FreeNAS using 4GB RAM and even NTFS formatted drives. To test that out you should run a VM on your Windows machine and see what you come up with.

Now that I went to the VM world, if you have a Windows machine you can connect the drives to then you could run a VM of FreeNAS and BAM! you got FreeNAS on Windows. How cool is that!

You have options, just start to think outside the box.

 

[danb35]

It'd be great if the FreeNAS team released a simple idiot-proof Windows client that could accept Replication data from a FreeNAS system for exactly my useage case.

That would require ZFS on Windows, and Windows is the one major OS that doesn't currently support ZFS. But there are, as noted, other ways of getting to a similar place.

 

[Midshipman]

joeschmuck, yeah, using Rsync on a Raspberry Pi might end up covering many of my bullet points. I'd bet I can find some RPI-combatible software to treat my multiple hard disks, connected via USB, as a single volume. Then setup an rsyn cron job on my FreeNAS to send to the RPI once an evening. I'll keep the RPI system in an offsite location most days (my car, at work, whatever) and bring it home once a month and just plug it in before the cron job's sync time.

Unless there's a way to get Rsync to work through the internet if I place my RPI at another house? (bullet point 4)

Also, you guys/gals are all awesome. Thanks for the advice!

 

[danb35]

Unless there's a way to get Rsync to work through the internet if I place my RPI at another house? (bullet point 4)

Sure: a VPN. Or ZeroTier, which is kind of a special case of a VPN.

 

[joeschmuck]

As my father always said "there is more than one way to skin a cat".

 

[UDO]

Hello, perhaps as an alternative ... depending on budget, and if you have some old pc case / power supply lying about, .. i have found the all in one intel atom mainboards to be good value overall. They are 64bit multicore, with ample expandability and connectivity options. Just add ram and drives.
i ran a setup like this for many years, before trading up to a hp microserver. (home nas duties). - these also make nice domestic media and firewall systems.
i have a rPi-3B+ - its a wonderful unit, but i think for your intented solution, it is not fit for purpose.